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Green Means Go

When it comes to being green, I can proudly say that my environmental consciousness is well pruned. I recycle everything that I can’t reuse, bring my own shopping bags to the store for locally grown produce, suffer through teenagers’ loud conversations about terrible music on my bus ride to work, and give an adequate amount of thought toward (maybe) starting my own compost pile. I find it quite easy to be green in my personal life, despite Kermit’s thoughts on the matter. But when the hot topic “green computing” started popping up in office conversations like SUVs in the '90s, I saw a whole new perspective on being green.

Other than including one of those “Please consider the environment before printing this” images as part of my email signature, I hadn’t really thought about how my work environment affected my other environment. Thankfully, the Windows IT Pro editorial team has a whole web page dedicated to the topic at WindowsITPro.com/GreenComputing.

According to Senior Editor Karen Bemowski, green computing refers to actions—such as consolidation and power management—that reduce IT departments’ impact on the environment. In her August 2008 web-exclusive article, “The Biggest Barriers to Going Green” (InstantDoc ID 99926), Karen references a CDW survey and explains that understanding why to implement green computing is fairly easy, but the how has stalled some organizations. “Although 80 percent of IT decision makers in government and corporate organizations believe that implementing green IT solutions is important, only 46 percent said their organizations were doing so.”

Even if you’re not personally interested in reducing your computing footprint, it’s likely that the money savings will interest your boss—or your boss’s boss. “IT Decision Makers Reveal Their Views on Going Green” (InstantDoc ID 99805) reports that “more than 70 percent of the IT decision makers \[surveyed\] said that they would probably or definitely increase their preference for purchasing green products if they were convinced there would be a positive effect on the environment and the business.” And with savings of up to $73 per computer, as stated in “How Much Money Can We Save If We Use Power-Management Policies” (InstantDoc ID 100877), I’d say these decision makers won’t have a hard time finding any “positive effects.”